China Boosts ‘Great Firewall’
China has successfully undermined key software used by its netizens to climb over the “Great Firewall,” a sophisticated system of government-backed blocks and filters designed to limit what people can view online.
“Right now, basically, the network is not stable because of the blocking. It started probably Sept. 1,” said Bill Xia, CEO of Dynamic Internet Technology, which created Freegate to circumvent government blocking.
“Since last Monday, we saw that it got worse and people started to find it more difficult to use the Freegate software—it may have difficulty connecting to our network or after it gets connected then very soon they get disconnected,” he said in an interview.
“It is getting close to National Day, so probably the government is spending more effort in trying to clampdown control of the Internet, at least around this time,” he said. “They’re trying more and more to block our software.”
